by Rosie Thomas
There was a little pause, and then Grace said, ‘That is what I hope to do, Herr Frankel.’
‘So. Tell me, what can I bring these distinguished guests of ours?’
Clio and Grace were hungry. The food, when it came, was piled high on thick white plates and it was excellent. They ate their eggs and ham and heavy German sausage while Julius drank coffee and told them about the concerts he had been playing.
‘There are problems, of course,’ he said. ‘But everyone has problems now.’
‘What kind of problems?’ Grace asked. Her voice had taken on a sharp, interrogative note.
‘Jewish ones,’ Julius said simply. The quiet that followed amplified the click of forks and chink of coffee spoons. Clio sat very still, knowing that Oswald Mosley was now a regular guest in Vincent Street, remembering how only yesterday she had seen Alice leaving the house with a pile of anti-Semitic fascist pamphlets to be handed out in the streets. Alice had taken to wearing a black shirt on her political expeditions.
Grace’s doing, she thought.
‘But you are not Jewish, are you?’ Grace countered. ‘I thought it was necessary for a Jew to have a Jewish mother. And your mother is no more a Jewess than mine is.’
‘To be considered a Jew nowadays, in Germany, it is only necessary to have one Jewish grandparent. My score is two, I am proud to say. But I am a foreigner; I have a British passport. It is easier for me than it is for other people.’
With an almost imperceptible tilt of his chin Julius indicated the other people in the café. Clio looked at them again, and realized what she had blithely failed to notice before. She pushed her plate away from her. Her appetite had gone. There was a little cold finger of apprehension pressing at the base of her spine.
‘What is this place?’ she asked Julius. ‘Who comes here?’
‘Jews.’ That was what Clio had belatedly seen. ‘Socialists. Even a few communists. Dissidents of various other kinds, who do not wish to follow the line marked out for them by the Führer or his brownshirts. We are comfortable here, together, thanks to Josef.’
Clio said, ‘It reminded me of the Eiffel when we first came in.’
Julius nodded. In a voice so low that they had to lean closer across the table to catch his words, he said, ‘The sense of in here against out there. But it isn’t the same. In the Eiffel we felt our superiority, didn’t we? The rest, the outsiders, were philistines, the unknowing. We could smile gently in our superiority as artists and intellectuals. But here we are beleaguered. This place is a refuge first, and a meeting place for the like-minded only a long way second. Don’t you feel that?’
Clio looked around at the men, sitting singly at their tables or in quiet groups of two or three. They held their newspapers folded so that the mastheads were not visible, and they watched the street door.
‘Yes,’ Clio said. The Café Josef felt like home but it also made a knot of apprehension tighten in her stomach.
Grace extracted a cigarette and her gold lighter from her handbag. Julius took the lighter from her hand and clicked it so that the flame spurted. Their fingers touched. Grace bent her head, and when she looked up again at Julius twin yellow plumes of light were reflected in her pupils.
‘Why are you beleaguered?’ she asked.
‘Oh, come. Even straight from England you must know what it means to be a Jew or a dissident in Germany today. You walked here through the streets with me not an hour ago.’
There was the flash of animation again at the prospect of a debate. Grace’s head came up as she answered the challenge.
‘I saw people on their way to work. I know that in 1930 a third of the labour force of this country was on the scrap heap and the wages of the rest had dropped by thirty-three per cent. Since Hitler has been in power the Nazis have resuscitated industry and introduced a public works programme that will halve unemployment figures. If we could do that at home, it would be something to be proud of. The Germans can be proud. Perhaps some unpalatable measures are necessary in the process of achieving an economic miracle.’
‘You sound like a speech in the House of Commons, Grace. Are random violence and persecution of the innocent and helpless as a matter of routine merely unpalatable?’
‘Perhaps some of Hitler’s agents employ the wrong tactics. Perhaps there are isolated incidents. I am sure the leadership, Hitler himself, knows nothing about them.’
‘You are sure, are you?’
‘Julius, you are a musician. A fine violinist. I am a politician.’
Can’t you see? Clio was thinking. You must see now what she’s like. But all she could see in Julius’s face was concern, and the old, ravenous glitter of his love.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I will ask Heinrich there to tell you a story.’
He lifted his hand, and a man who had been sitting at one of the other tables stood up and came across to them. Julius introduced him, but only by his first name. Heinrich had a thin, lined face and his clothes and his manner were as colourless as his unmemorable features. Clio understood that his anonymity was deliberate.
‘My sister and my cousin,’ Julius assured him. ‘They are friends. Will you tell them what happened to Herr Keller?’
Heinrich spread his hands on the table, palms down. Josef brought him a blue-grey pottery mug of beer but he left it untouched at his elbow.
‘I worked for Herr Keller,’ Heinrich said. ‘He was a Jew. He was an excellent lawyer and a good employer. I was his … what would you call it?’ he appealed to Julius.
‘His clerk.’
‘Exactly so. It happened that Herr Keller was often called upon to defend political prisoners.’
‘Enemies of the Reich, you understand,’ Julius said softly.
‘And then one morning, no more than a month ago, Herr Keller did not come to our office at the usual time. I waited for him. He was a punctual man, and I had never known him to be late before.’
The bell over the door jangled on the end of its metal strip. Clio and Grace looked up with the others, and they saw a man and a woman come in. The man was tall, as tall as Julius, and he stooped a little as if he was used to living under low ceilings. He wore a sheepskin-lined coat, like a farmer’s, and a knitted cap that he pulled off to uncover a head of thick fair hair. The girl with him was hatless. She was also blonde, and her hair was plaited and the plaits were wound round her head like a crown.
The newcomers were obviously familiars. They came straight to Julius’s table, drawing up chairs to join the circle. The table was not large and now the six of them found their shoulders rubbing together, making conspirators of them. Josef leant over with more tankards of beer, and coffee for the girl with the crown of hair.
‘Heinrich was just telling us a story,’ Julius said. ‘About Herr Keller and the Brothers Sass.’
‘Go on, Heinrich,’ the blond man said. He looked coolly at Clio and Grace. ‘After the story we can introduce ourselves.’ His English was almost accentless.
‘I waited for Herr Keller all that morning, but he did not come. In the end I left the office and went to his flat, in the Wedding district. From the window of every apartment in his building there was hanging a swastika flag.’
Clio had seen the flags from the train, through the brown mist, blood-red squares enclosing white circles with the black swastika. There had been dozens of others in the streets between Pariser Platz and the Café Josef. They lent the city an air of ominous gaiety, as if it were decked out for a fête planned on some inappropriate date.
‘Except that there was no flag in Herr Keller’s window. I knocked on his door, hammered on it, but no one came. Herr Keller was a bachelor who lived alone. If he was not there to answer the door, no one could let me in. In the end I went down and found the caretaker of the building, an old woman, who said she had seen nothing. But she let me into the apartment with her key. It was empty, and quite as usual. A chair had been overturned, that was all.’
They sat in silence around the table. Hein
rich took a draught of his beer and wiped the froth from his lips. Grace clicked her lighter, just once, but the shade of her impatience was unmistakable.
‘I telephoned Herr Keller’s relatives, but none of them knew where he had gone. The police denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. A whole week passed.
‘And then his sister came to see me. A political detainee, a friend of Herr Keller’s, had called on her. Her brother had been seen, he could not reveal by whom, lying in the cellar of an SA barracks near Alexanderplatz. He had been too badly injured to move, even to recognize anyone.
‘Then, a day later, we were notified that Herr Keller had been brought to police headquarters. But none of his friends were to be allowed to see him. He was being kept under arrest for his own protection, that is what they called it, in the hospital of the prison.
‘But almost at once, we heard another rumour. A gang of SA men had gone to the police hospital, and insisted that Herr Keller be returned to them for questioning. The police informed his sister that he had been handed over to the Nazis, who wished to investigate further his serious crimes against the Reich.
‘What could we do? I had to tell his sister that I was afraid there was an end to it. I did not think we would see him again.
‘But then, after two more days, Herr Keller was found. He was lying in an alleyway behind a cinema, no more than a few hundred metres from his own home. A shopkeeper, a man who owned a little dairy, had found him when he went to open up in the early morning. He told Herr Keller’s sister there was so much blood that he thought for a moment a drum of oil had been spilt by someone trying to set light to a bundle of rags in the gutter.
‘He was still alive. The shopkeeper carried him in, and Fraulein Keller and I went to him. We took one of our own doctors –’ here Heinrich glanced at the blond man ‘– and between the three of us we managed to get him back to his own apartment. His tongue had been cut out and his ears had been sliced away. One of his eyes was gouged from the socket and his sex organs had been severely mutilated. The doctor did what he could, which was almost nothing. Herr Keller died before the morning was over.’
Grace’s gold lighter was clenched in her fist now. Julius moved an inch forward, leaning towards her as if he wished he could have protected her from the necessity of hearing Heinrich’s story. Clio moved her lips. Her mouth and throat were dry, painfully so.
‘Who are the Brothers Sass?’ she whispered.
The new man surprised her with a smile. It acknowledged humour, even absurdity, without diminishing the horror and the pity of what Heinrich had described.
‘SA and SS,’ he said. ‘We call them the Brothers. For their good fellowship, and compassion to all men.’
Julius said to Grace, ‘These things happen every day. Innocent ordinary men simply vanish, and never come home again. Or there are attacks in the streets, when half a dozen brownshirts with truncheons turn on a single man. And even when there is no violence, there is the steady persecution of socialists, communists, and non-Aryans. Jewish shopkeepers are made to display signs in their windows, telling their old customers that Germans may only buy from other Germans. There are demands to stop Jewish pupils from attending schools and universities, and Jewish doctors and lawyers are boycotted. How can these people live, if they can’t work?’
The girl with the crown of hair said, ‘It extends even to the smallest things. I have taken my washing, for two years, ever since I came to Berlin, to the same laundress. Just this morning she refused to take it, saying that she is too busy now. I know that it is because someone has told her that I am Jewish, and probably a communist also. Now I must look around and try to find a Jewish laundry.’
Clio gazed at her. With her pale hair and light-coloured eyes the girl looked a perfect Nordic type, the Aryan ideal. Her husband, or lover, whatever he was, looked just the same. They might have appeared on a poster advocating racial purity.
‘We are all Jews,’ the man said, smiling at Clio. ‘We can’t help our colouring. And we are also Germans. I come from Thuringia, my father kept a small farm machinery business.’
He held out his hand to her, across the small table with its clutter of beer steins and cups and cutlery.
‘My name is Rafael Wolf.’
‘I am Clio … Hirsh.’ Her real name here, Nathaniel’s name and grandfather Levi’s before that. Levi and Dora had come to England two generations ago, but they would have left behind them a village not very different from Rafael Wolf’s. In Berlin, in the Café Josef, there was no need for her to admit to Miles Lennox. The realization cheered her.
Rafael laughed. ‘Of course. Julius’s twin sister. That’s not difficult to see.’
‘And I am Grete.’
The girl held out her hand too, and Clio and Grace took it in turn. Watching Grete’s face Clio thought how lovely she was, with her broad, smooth forehead and clear eyes. Clio tried to make sense of the impressions of the morning: the story of Herr Keller, the sight of the flags hanging in the streets and the men in uniform and the people with their averted eyes, and this beautiful girl’s claim that a laundress had refused her custom because of her race. Berlin seemed a terrible and threatening place, but it drew her too – because of the Café Josef, and Julius and these people.
She listened to Rafael talking to Grace. She wanted to turn her head to look at him, but she did not. She looked at Grete instead, and at Julius lounging over another cup of Josef’s coffee.
Grace did look as well as listen. She had put her gold lighter away, and her hands were clasped on the table in front of her. She had seen Rafael Wolf glance at the rings she wore, and then the corners of his mouth had tucked in. There was a judgemental quality about him that she did not like very much.
Heinrich’s story had shocked her. She had no doubt that the substance of it was true, and everything else she had heard probably also had at least a basis of truth in it. The brutality disgusted her, even if it was exaggerated in the telling. But as she had rationalized to Julius, was it not also true that small pockets of shameful behaviour at the end of the chain of command were an inevitable part of otherwise admirable movements?
Grace knew well enough that even in London there was viciousness between her friend Tom Mosley’s Blackshirts and the young Bolshevik boys who followed the tail of the marches, and between the hecklers at his meetings and his official marshals. When strong opinions and strong emotions were unleashed it was not always easy to control the people; Tom had told her that much, with deep concern. It must be the same here in Berlin; that much she could establish for herself by watching and listening.
In her heart, for all her provocative defence of them, Grace was neither in favour of nor opposed to the Nazis. She was intrigued by what was happening in Berlin, and all the rest of Germany, and she was impressed by the power that Hitler had accumulated. The Café Josef, and Julius’s friends and their testimonies, would be weighed against the rest of her observations in good time.
‘Is this only happening to the Jews and political dissidents here in Berlin?’ Grace asked Rafael.
‘Not just here, no. In Munich, under the eyes of the Führer, and everywhere else too. Jewish families are emigrating from all over Germany, especially from the Rhineland and Saxony. Some of them have come to Berlin because they believe that they are safer and less conspicuous as strangers in a big city than in the villages where they have lived all their lives.’
‘They have that option, then,’ Grace said quietly.
Rafael was calm, seemingly imperturbable. ‘Yes, no one has yet tried to deny them the right to leave. But they are also Germans, you see. They consider themselves to be Germans of the Jewish faith. Why should they leave their homes and their livelihoods for Hitler and his bully-boys like Streicher?’
Grace did not try to frame the answer that came immediately to her, Because Hitler is creating a new Germany, for the German people, and there is no room in it for profiteering, for capitalist corruption, for the perversion of the na
tional resources by a small minority.
The small minority of bad Jews, of course. She made the old distinction still.
With Rafael Wolf’s eyes resting meditatively on her she only said, ‘I don’t know why.’
‘Perhaps you will have found out some more before you go back to London and the House of Commons?’
Julius came to her defence. ‘Rafael? Grace has only been in Berlin for a few hours. She has made the effort to come here, at least, instead of giving vent to ignorant and noisy speeches to the House like a dozen other MPs.’
Rafael’s expression changed at once. ‘Yes, of course. Forgive me, Grace. These are not comfortable times for any of us, but there is no excuse for bad manners.’
‘I forgive you,’ Grace suddenly smiled back at him. It seemed to Clio that Rafael Wolf’s charm worked instantly on Grace to make her as coquettish as a débutante in a ballroom. She kept her own eyes turned downwards, but still she saw his long hands and wrists protruding from the shaggy cuffs of his farmer’s coat.
The conspirators’ group around the table was breaking up. Heinrich nodded abruptly to Clio and Grace and went back to his own table. Grete took her woollen mittens from her pocket and thrust her hands into them.
‘I must go and search for a Jewish laundry.’
She was smiling, as if at some outlandish joke. Rafael stood up to accompany her. He said goodbye gravely to Julius and the two women.
‘I’m sure we shall meet again,’ he bowed. Clio watched the two of them until the door closed behind them with a mournful ting of the bell.
‘Back to the Adlon,’ Grace announced. ‘I feel that Herr Wolf has given me a responsibility to discharge.’
‘I’ll walk with you,’ Julius said.
Josef came out from behind his bar to say goodbye. ‘We are all friends, here,’ he reminded them. ‘And I have no need of any more customers. Please don’t trouble to recommend me to anyone, will you?’